Understanding Christ’s headship of and love for the Church captures our affections and provides definition to our love for one another through which we experience harmony in all of our relationships within the church.

Tyler’s Main Points

• Jesus Christ is the servant-hearted head of His body, the Church.
• Christ’s love for the Church is covenantal, sacrificial, sanctifying, and satisfying.
• The Church’s response to Christ’s headship should be willing and joyful submission.
  

Key Takeaways

• Seeing the sacrificial love of Jesus is to capture our hearts. Marriage is the living metaphor of Christ’s union of the Church.
  
  
• Through Christ, the body is led, fed, grown, and cared for. Christ has used His headship to serve us, save us, and sacrifice for us.
  
  
• Before the foundation of the world, the eternal Son of God covenanted to save, establish, and sanctify the Church.
  
  
• Every person in the Church is subject to the headship of Christ. Christ’s body is to reflect the glory, beauty, goodness, and love of the head Jesus Christ.
  

• Christ’s commitment to the Church is not contractual, but covenantal. He will follow through on His commitment even when we fall short.

• Christ’s love is wholly different than ours—while we still sinners and enemies of God, He suffered and died for our sins.

• As Tyler preaches, “We like to think we are deserving of God’s love or more deserving than others, but we are recipients of His love by grace.

• When we forget what we’ve been forgiven for, we lose sight of the grace we’ve been given and how great His love is for us.”

• Christ is doing in us what we can’t do ourselves and He will finish what He started.

• Headship and submission are not bad, but beautiful things under the care, love, and authority of our perfect King.
  
  

Discussion Questions/Application

Personal application:

• How will the servant-hearted love of Christ impact your relationships this week?
  
  
• How are you prone to turn from Christ rather than to Him when it comes to being fed, led, and satisfied?
  

Discuss with your community group:

• How has this week’s message stirred your affections for Christ’s love towards the Church and towards you personally?
  
  
• As ordained by God, how are biblical headship and submission not bad but beautiful things?

Passages Referenced for Further Study
Ephesians 5:21-33; 2 Peter 1:12-15; Ephesians 1:4-5; Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-6; John 15:13; Romans 5:6-10; 1 John 4:19; Revelation 19:4-9; 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8.